📖 Your Story is Incomplete

You are the sum total of every experience you've ever had, and everything that comes next will be influenced by what you have done and what you are doing now.

Imagine yourself a book, rich in nuance and veritably overflowing with personality.

You tell a fulsome story. Beginning, middle, and end. You are cohesive and compelling, each component reinforcing the others and working in unison to say something.

There's an elegance in you; one that others recognize when they allow themselves to take in all of you—every word and chapter. They've observed your dance of prose and substance, holding you dearly because they sense they'll never experience something quite like that again.

Now imagine yourself a lone chapter of this book. You play an important role, yes. Pivotal, perhaps! Without you, the revealed plot just wouldn't quite add up. The reader would be left wanting that extra dose of character development, or perhaps that series of events that provides context and understanding to every event covered elsewhere.

Yet you'll never be more than "just" a chapter. You may have been written to stand out, but you were never written to stand alone. The more striking your isolation, the less you cohere.

Imagine yourself, if you will, a single page. Severed of your predecessor and successor, you're adrift. You cannot possibly make sense on your own, masterfully written though you may be. You cannot hope to convey all that you wish, as you were made to nestle between others. Without them, you could just as easily be a part of any other number of stories.

You know you belong here—this story you're a part of is indeed yours—but you've spent so much time rereading yourself that you've started to forget what "here" really feels like. The disorientation may be profound.

A step even further, now. Imagine yourself a sentence.

An epic tale of 10,000 sentences in your book, yet you're just one. A droplet in an overwhelming sea. Can you discern yourself without considering all the others? Can you dare to influence the entire arc with just your minuscule string of words? You are no "Call me Ishmael." So what, then, is the point?

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You are the sum total of every experience you've ever had, and everything that comes next will be influenced by what you have done and what you are doing now.

I have been reflecting lately on how easy it is to lose sight of the book of it all. If every moment is a word, we'd be wise to consider the broader context in which that word exists, though it's tantalizingly easy to let any given moment take control.

Like a language model, we let every word help predict the next. It's simple to continue in the same vein, and infinitely harder to disrupt the pattern in furtherance of something approaching a desirable ending.

If I am to live 80 years, I'm almost halfway there. For as insecure as I am in some of the words my internal predictive engine continues to produce, I also feel increasing awareness and ownership of the words of the book I'm implicitly writing. Maybe that's just what happens as one grows older.

I cannot rewrite chapters already published, but I can learn from them. I can study and recognize patterns.

And perhaps, with the right approach, I can change the parts of the plot that don't sit quite right. My story is unfinished, after all.

Yours is too, dear reader.

Incompletely Yours,

—Rye